“I’ll leave a note for Wilma telling her where we’ve gone and then we’ll call…who do you suggest, Dex? Campus security or the state police?”
“You believe me, don’t you? You believe me? Just say you do.”
“Yes, I believe you,” Henry said, and it was the truth. “I don’t know what that thing could be or where it came from, but I believe you.” Dex Stanley began to weep.
“Finish your drink while I write my wife,” Henry said, apparently not noticing the tears. He even grinned a little. “And for Christ’s sake, let’s get out of here before she gets back.”
Dex clutched at Henry’s sleeve. “But we won’t go anywhere near Amberson Hall, will we? Promise me, Henry! We’ll stay away from there, won’t we?”
“Does a bear shit in the woods?” Henry Northrup asked. It was a three-mile drive to Dex’s house on the outskirts of town, and before they 85
got there, he was half-asleep in the passenger seat.
“The state cops, I think,” Henry said. His words seemed to come from a great distance. “I think Charlie Gereson’s assessment of the campus cops was pretty accurate. The first one there would happily stick his arm into that box.”
“Yes. All right.” Through the drifting, lassitudinous aftermath of shock, Dex felt a dim but great gratitude that his friend had taken over with such efficiency. Yet a deeper part of him believed that Henry could not have done it if he had seen the things he had seen. “Just…the importance of caution …”
“I’ll see to that,” Henry said grimly, and that was when Dex fell asleep.
He awoke the next morning with August sunshine making crisp patterns on the sheets of his bed. Just a dream, he thought with indescribable relief. All some crazy dream.
But there was a taste of Scotch in his mouth–Scotch and something else. He sat up, and a lance of pain bolted through his head. Not the sort of pain you got from a hangover, though; not even if you were the type to get a hangover from three Scotches, and he wasn’t.
He sat up, and there was Henry, sitting across the room. His first thought was that Henry needed a shave. His second was that there was something in Henry’s eyes that he had never seen before – something like chips of ice. A ridiculous thought came to Dex; it passed through his mind and was gone. Sniper’s eyes.
Henry Northrup, whose specialty is the earlier English poets, has got sniper’s eyes.
“How are you feeling, Dex?”
“A slight headache,” Dex said. “Henry…the police…what happened?”
“The police aren’t coming,” Northrup said calmly. “As for your head, I’m very sorry. I put one of Wilma’s sleeping powders in your third drink. Be assured that it will pass.”
“Henry, what are you saying?”
Henry took a sheet of notepaper from his breast pocket. “This is the note I left my wife. It will explain a lot, I think. I got it back after everything was over. I took a chance that she’d leave it on the table, and I got away with it.”
“I don’t know what you’re – ”
He took the note from Henry’s fingers and read it, eyes widening.
Dear Billie,
I’ve just had a call from Dex Stanley. He’s hysterical. Seems to have committed some sort of indiscretion with one of his female grad students. He’s at Amberson Hall. So is the girl. For God’s sake, come quickly. I’m not sure exactly what the situation is, but a woman’s 86
presence may be imperative, and under the circumstances, a nurse from the infirmary just won’t do. I know you don’t like Dex much, but a scandal like this could ruin his career. Please come.
Henry.
“What in God’s name have you done?” Dex asked hoarsely.
Henry plucked the note from Dex’s nerveless fingers, produced his Zippo, and set flame to the corner. When it was burning well, he dropped the charring sheet of paper into an ashtray on the windowsill.
“I’ve killed Wilma,” he said in the same calm voice. “Ding-dong, the wicked bitch is dead.” Dex tried to speak and could not. That central axle was trying to tear loose again. The abyss of utter insanity was below. “I’ve killed my wife, and now I’ve put myself into your hands.”
Now Dex did find his voice. It had a sound that was rusty yet shrill.
“The crate,” he said. “What have you done with the crate?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Henry said. “You put the final piece in the jigsaw yourself. The crate is at the bottom of Ryder’s Quarry.”
Dex groped at that while he looked into Henry’s eyes. The eyes of his friend. Sniper’s eyes. You can’t knock off your own queen, that’s not in anyone’s rules of chess, he thought, and restrained an urge to roar out gales of rancid laughter. The quarry, he had said. Ryder’s Quarry. It was over four hundred feet deep, some said. It was perhaps twelve miles east of the university. Over the thirty years that Dex had been here, a dozen people had drowned there, and three years ago the town had posted the place.
“I put you to bed,” Henry said. “Had to carry you into your room. You were out like a light. Scotch, sleeping powder, shock. But you were breathing normally and well. Strong heart action. I checked those things.
Whatever else you believe, never think I had any intention of hurting you, Dex.
“It was fifteen minutes before Wilma’s last class ended, and it would take her another fifteen minutes to drive home and another fifteen minutes to get over to Amberson Hall. That gave me forty-five minutes.
I got over to Amberson in ten. It was unlocked. That was enough to settle any doubts I had left.”
“What do you mean?”
“The key ring on the janitor’s belt. It went with the janitor.”
Dex shuddered.
“If the door had been locked – forgive me, Dex, but if you’re going to play for keeps, you ought to cover every base – there was still time enough to get back home ahead of Wilma and burn that note.
“I went downstairs – and I kept as close to the wall going down those stairs as I could, believe me…”
Henry stepped into the lab and glanced around. It was just as Dex had 87
left it.
He slicked his tongue over his dry lips and then wiped his face with his hand.
His heart was thudding in his chest. Get hold of yourself, man. One thing at a time. Don’t look ahead.
The boards the janitor had pried off the crate were still stacked on the lab table. One table over was the scatter of Charlie Gereson’s lab notes, never to be completed now. Henry took it all in, and then pulled his own flashlight – the one he always kept in the glovebox of his car for emergencies – from his back pocket. If this didn’t qualify as an emergency, nothing did.
He snapped it on and crossed the lab and went out the door. The light bobbed uneasily in the dark for a moment, and then he trained it on the floor. He didn’t want to step on anything he shouldn’t. Moving slowly and cautiously, Henry moved around to the side of the stairs and shone the light underneath. His breath paused, and then resumed again, more slowly. Suddenly the tension and fear were gone, and he only felt cold.
The crate was under there, just as Dex had said it was. And the janitor’s ballpoint pen. And his shoes. And Charlie Gereson’s glasses.
Henry moved the light from one of these artifacts to the next slowly, spotlighting each. Then he glanced at his watch, snapped the flashlight off and jammed it back in his pocket. He had half an hour. There was no time to waste.
In the janitor’s closet upstairs he found buckets, heavy-duty cleaner, rags…and gloves. No prints. He went back downstairs like the sorcerer’s apprentice, a heavy plastic bucket full of hot water and foaming cleaner in each hand, rags draped over his shoulder. His footfalls clacked hollowly in the stillness. He thought of Dex saying, It sits squat and mute. And still he was cold.
He began to clean up.
“She came,” Henry said. “Oh yes, she came. And she was…excited and happy.”
“What?” Dex said.
“Excited,” he repeated. “She was whining and carping the way she always did in that high, unpleasant voice, but that was just habit, I think.
All those years, Dex, the only part of me she wasn’t able to completely control, the only part she could never get completely under her thumb, was my friendship with you. Our two drinks while she was at class. Our chess. Our…companionship.”
Dex nodded. Yes, companionship was the right word. A little light in the darkness of loneliness. It hadn’t just been the chess or the drinks; it had been Henry’s face over the board, Henry’s voice recounting how things were in his department, a bit of harmless gossip, a laugh over 88